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This weekend I made some more memories, for those of you that have not heard my keynote, my main message is to not wait until tomorrow – make your memories today, and that’s what I did by challenging myself to enter the Memory Championships held yesterday in Cambridge.
The winner was to walk away with a return flight to Malaysia and an entry into the World Memory Championships in September. I’m realistic and knew I wasn’t at a level to win the overall thing but the same prize was offered for ‘Best Beginner’ – ie someone who has never entered a championship before, and I slotted in to this category.
Being the positive person I was I went there with the aim of winning my category and a place in the World Memory Championships, I also wanted to see how I’d perform in a competition environment and find out how I fared against other memorisers.
What a day though! OK, so I didn’t win the place I wanted in the World Memory Championships, which did disappoint me, in fact, under the stressful conditions of competition, I performed pretty terribly (more on this later) but I did learn a few things and made some great memories along the way.
You see, I came 10th.... out of 12! Which was a bit of a blow considering I was fired up for taking first place! This did knock the wind out of my sails somewhat, however, as with everything else I’ve found some really positive stuff out of the experience.
There was a high percentage of professional menthathletes (mental – athletes) at the championship, including the reigning World Champion, Clements Mayer (who memorized a pack of cards in 45 secs! Wow!), and each one of them had specific training methods to get their brain in to the right state for memorizing including juggling, super stacks (stacking plastic cups in to pyramids really quickly), special sunglasses to allow them to focus on the information to be memorized and so on.
No doubt these guys did some good solid, relaxing preparation in the two days before the championship. Not me though - technically I could have prepared more – drinking huge amounts of alcohol on a stag weekend in the 48 hours previous to the competition is probably not the best preparation for a Memory Championship, but you know what – I made some great memories doing it! Mind you, I’m fairly certain some of them have been wiped out too, but none the less, spending time with some close friends having a great laugh and following it up the day after with quad biking and clay pigeon shooting (both new activities to me and not recommended with a hangover!) allowed me to make some great memories.
So there was lesson one for me – We’re all different, approach things differently and get our kicks in different ways, doing the preparation those true professionals did wasn’t and isn’t for me – it might make great memories for them, but for me, my memories are made in a different way. So, are you making the memories you want to? And are you making them the WAY you want to?
I was particularly proud of one event, which I’ve found difficult, and that’s memorizing binary numbers, that’s right ones and zeroes – a whole sheet covered in them. In five minutes I memorized 90 ones and zeroes but could only recall 72 in order – shame on me I know! 72 ones and zeroes in perfect order isn’t particularly arousing for me (believe it or not!) and the winner of that discipline got ten times more than me with 720 in the same amount of time. An amazing achievement which made me feel more than a little small, but there was a lesson for life in that too.
Lesson number two was that my 72 numbers, for me, was the same as 720 for that guy, it was my personal best. Aren’t we just so good at comparing ourselves to other people and not meeting the mark? I shouldn’t focus on what I hadn’t achieved but what I HAD achieved. Are there times when you beat yourself up about NOT doing something rather than congratulating yourself on something you HAVE done? Do you regularly use another person as a benchmark for yourself?
Then my overall result, as I said earlier, I basically came last – the two guys below me hadn’t competed in all ten events, so there I was bottom of the leader board with 1245 championship points – the winner incidentally got 6,677! Not a great result for the day, and certainly not what I was going for, but again I’ve found something positive out of this.
You see, the championship points are a way of translating your scores in to another scoring system that can compare the event you took part in against other competitors in other events. Now, the official world rankings are yet to be updated so I won’t know my definitive position, but currently, my 1245 points places me somewhere around number 150 in the entire world for memory.
Now that’s an achievement. To only have about 149 people on the planet ranked above me out of the several squillion people who inhabit our orbiting sphere, is pretty good I think and despite it not being what I wanted, it's a result to be proud of nonetheless.
And there’s the third lesson – it may seem like a rubbish outcome, my goal wasn’t reached at all, but I did achieve something pretty remarkable anyway, did I fail? Technically yes in terms of my goal, but if I’d failed surely I wouldn’t have achieved anything at all? Is there something that you feel you may have failed at yet on re-framing it you find the positive side?
So I made some more memories, and believe me, seeing some of my friends dance to a very camp boy band during the stag weekend is probably a memory I’d rather wipe out completely, but that’s what life is all about isn’t it? Making memories. |
